Brazil is having a quiet but consequential subsea cable moment. With Anatel continuing to refine its regulatory framework for submarine cable landings, Fortaleza cementing its status as one of the busiest cable hubs in the Southern Hemisphere, and a new generation of transatlantic and South America–Africa systems either lit or in planning, the country is positioned to become the indispensable digital crossroads of the South Atlantic. Whether it actually gets there will depend on a choice Brasília has not yet fully made: between fast, proportionate regulation that welcomes investment, and security-coded paperwork that quietly throttles it.
The strategic case is already strong. EllaLink, the 6,000-kilometre Fortaleza–Sines system that lit in 2021, gave Brazil and the EU their first direct fibre link, bypassing the long-standing detour through North America. Google's Firmina cable, designed to run from the US East Coast to Praia Grande with branches in Las Toninas and Punta del Este, extends Brazil's connectivity westward. Multiple South America–Africa systems — notably the South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) between Fortaleza and Luanda — anchor the country as the natural pivot point between Europe, Africa and the Americas. Industry trackers such as TeleGeography count more than two dozen international cables landing in Brazil, with Fortaleza alone hosting one of the densest cable landing-station clusters in the world.
What Anatel is actually doing
Anatel's submarine cable framework, built around Resolution 614/2013 and subsequent acts, requires authorisation for cable landings, environmental clearance via IBAMA, and coordination with the Navy's maritime authority (DHN) and ANP for seabed crossings. In recent years the agency has been tightening reporting expectations, formalising landing-station licensing categories, and consulting on rules for resilience, route diversity, and incident reporting — reflecting the same anxieties that animated the EU's 2024 cable security recommendation and NATO's post-Baltic-Sea cable protection push.
Some of this is overdue and welcome. After a string of cable incidents in the Baltic Sea and Red Sea, no serious regulator can ignore resilience. Mandating that operators report cuts, share routing information with authorities, and demonstrate physical-security plans is a reasonable baseline. The European Commission's February 2024 recommendation on the security and resilience of submarine cable infrastructure sets out a similar logic, and the US FCC's 2024 NPRM on submarine cable licence reform moved in a comparable direction. Brazil joining that conversation is good news.
Where proportionality matters
The risk is that "cable security" becomes a vehicle for slower permitting, opaque foreign-investment screening, or data-localisation pressure dressed up as resilience. Three guardrails should shape Anatel's next moves.
First, keep permitting timelines short and predictable. Cable projects are 3–5 year capital commitments financed by consortia spanning multiple jurisdictions. Every additional month of uncertainty in IBAMA or Anatel review raises financing costs and pushes traffic to competing landing points in Chile, Argentina or further afield. The Telecommunications Industry Association and ITU have repeatedly documented that landing-permit predictability — not subsidy — is the single biggest driver of where consortia choose to land. Brazil's competitive edge here is real but not unique.
Second, resist sovereignty theatre. Proposals occasionally surface in Brasília — echoing debates in Jakarta and New Delhi — to require local equity, local landing-station ownership, or mandatory data routing through domestic infrastructure. These ideas almost always backfire. Indonesia's 2021 attempt to mandate domestic routing rules created exactly the kind of regulatory drag that nudged several planned hyperscaler-backed cables towards Singapore and Malaysia. Brazil's comparative advantage is geography, not gatekeeping.
Third, treat resilience as a network problem, not a single-cable problem. The best protection against sabotage or accidental damage is route diversity and spare capacity, not heavier per-cable compliance. Anatel can deliver that by streamlining authorisations for branching units, beach manholes, and additional landing stations in cities other than Fortaleza — Praia Grande, Salvador, Rio and Santos all have under-used potential.
The Africa opportunity
The most underappreciated piece of Brazil's cable hand is the South Atlantic. While Atlantic Ocean traffic between the US and Europe is intensely competitive and increasingly hyperscaler-funded, the South America–Africa corridor remains thin. SACS demonstrated commercial viability; reported new projects connecting Brazil to South Africa, Nigeria and Cabo Verde could turn Fortaleza into the natural interconnection point for African traffic flowing to Latin America and onward to Asia via Pacific cables. Brazil's leadership of the BRICS grouping in 2025 gave it a diplomatic platform to push for South–South digital corridors; the regulatory framework now has to match the rhetoric.
A pro-innovation path
The right Anatel agenda is unglamorous but powerful: publish service-level commitments for landing-permit decisions, harmonise IBAMA and Navy reviews into a single coordinated window, codify a light-touch incident-reporting regime aligned with the EU recommendation, and explicitly bar local-content or local-routing mandates as conditions of authorisation. Done well, this would lower Brazil's cost of becoming the South Atlantic's digital pivot — without sacrificing the legitimate security oversight that the current global environment demands.
Cables, unlike most regulated industries, vote with their landing points. If Brazil makes itself the easy yes, the traffic will follow. If it makes itself a paperwork-heavy maybe, the cables will route around it — and the South Atlantic moment will pass to someone else.